Yesterday I realized that it's going to be my job one day to explain and even justify outdated technology like landline phones and dial-up Internet. It struck me just how absurd it all sounds in light of modern tech, how unbelievable it would sound to a kid who never knew a world without instant, wireless communication. "Well, for about a century people mostly talked on phones that were made immobile by being plugged into a specialized jack in the wall, which itself only had access to the outside world thanks to an almost impossibly complex series of wires both below and above ground, spanning most of the globe. Also, you had to ask who was calling every single time." The ridiculousness of landlines trumps my father's complaints about typewriters, hands down.

Before the Internet, most of us imagined the technology of the future the way people always do. We just took concepts that already existed and imagined them working better or offering more or being somehow magical. In particular, I recall people half-joking about TV culture of the far-off 21st century during the initial cable explosion. Circa 1990 or so, the gag was that the number and variety of TV stations would continue to expand exponentially until there was literally a channel for every unique interest, no matter how peculiar or obscure. It was a shared, quasi-dystopian nightmare of information over-saturation. The fear that compelled this deceptively dark joke was that we, as a society, would get lost in the never-ending torrent of content, that we'd never regain control.

But that's the beauty of the Internet. Youtube, combined with all the other video sites both legitimate and shady, is truly the best modern analog we have to the TV of Infinite Channels, though with one important distinction. With television you have to surf through all the channels you don't want to watch and all the content on the channels you like but don't want to watch right now. You're given so much choice that it always ends up feeling like settling. At best, you can program your TV and digital recorder to only give you what you want, when you want it, but that's just a really expensive, complicated version of what the Internet inherently allows. Youtube is the TVoIC but it's at the mercy of every individual user.

That's why it doesn't really bother me that one of the most-watched videos on Youtube right now is a year-old upload of a rather... substantial woman sharing her little funk riff about sitting on the toilet. After all, I can just click away and never really interact with it again. It's not going to take up space that would otherwise be occupied by the videos I want to watch. It's not going to be promoted in between the videos I want to watch. It's just going to exist in its own, little circuit of posts, reposts, remixes and autotune jokes for all the people who just can't get enough of that doo-rag, routine elimination jam.